Sweets

On my way to work today I needed to pick up something sweet to contribute to a goodbye breakfast for a colleague. I was walking to the PATH station when I passed the new coffee/dessert place in town and thought, "Yeah. Support the new local business."

So I went in. I actually wasn't sure whether they sold their treats "in bulk," or if they were strictly a-coffee-&-a-slice-of-cake kind of place, so I asked whether they had boxes. The answer was, "Yes, but we're actually not open yet." They didn't mean in general, they meant for the day. This, despite the fact that the display cases were stocked, the owner and another employee were there and the door was propped open.

Now, since I hadn't planned on going there in the first place and only stopped in as a spur-of-the-moment thing, I wasn't particularly inconvenienced. But I was a little perplexed that a new business owner would pass up the opportunity to establish a relationship with a customer. I mean, I was there, she was there, the mini cupcakes were there, the box to put them in was there--how hard would it have been for this transaction to come together? Instead, I was left with sort of a weird feeling of rejection. A minor rejection, granted, but one that, let's face it, could impact my decision to go back there.

The happy ending to this is that I continued on my way to the PATH station and stopped in Carlo's Bakery, which I've passed about a million times since moving to the 6th Borough, but had never set foot in because they looked like a fancy cake store and I am rarely in need of a fancy cake. As it turns out, they are actually an Italian bakery, so now I've found a place in town to get biscotti (my favorite), sfogliatella (the hubby's fave) and cannolis (everybody's favorite). So one local business's loss is another's gain.